1898

So!  How freaky is this picture?  It looks like some kind of pioneer ghost family.  Right there in the middle is my grandma, with her brothers Jack, Iden and Walter on the left;  her dad Edward with baby Herbert, and her mother Elizabeth (Lizzie) on the right.  And that would be their mansion in the background.   I would have been very hard pressed to figure all that out on my own, but this was one of my mom’s pictures, and she had a habit (good or bad) of writing pertinent information on things.  So that’s how I know the year is 1898 and grandma is 11 years old.  There are two more baby brothers yet to come – Carl and Jake.  What an incredible amount of change grandma must have seen in the world from this moment on, all the way to 1985.  She used to tell us we had no idea how hard life could be, and of course she was right that we didn’t.  All those brothers, for one thing.  And I expect being the oldest and the only girl made for a lot of responsibilities and hard work for her. 

When I was little my grandma was just ‘grandma’ and it was beyond my imagination to conjure up any other kind of role for her.  She looked after us whenever mom went away.  She made delicious potato and yellow bean cream soup.  She ate bread dunked in bacon fat to grease her joints.  She sewed and quilted and worked long hours in the garden and her flower beds, and she went to church every Sunday without fail.  Then when we were older she embarassed us by saying strange things to our boyfriends. 

I wonder what her dreams were when she was eleven.  I hope some of them came true.